> A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructure costs and other barriers to entry give a market's largest supplier an overwhelming advantage over competitors. An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

I'm going to assume ignorance rather than snark here.

A natural monopoly is one where a product or service is:

- Widely considered fundamental to the public good (and in most cases, has very inflexible demand, meaning that people will often pay any sum to access it)

- Whose cost overheads are either fixed or grow slower than the variable costs (meaning that the investment required to scale the service not accounting for costs that scale with individual usage benefit from economies of scale)

- Easy to be gamed for profit in the hands of a profit-driven entity (either in the form of extortionate pricing directly, or cost-cutting on things like infrastructure maintenance; a good example here is how PG&E has infamously failed to maintained their power lines in California, leading to large-scale wildfires)

In the modern day, the best example of these are public utilities: water, power, road networks, public transit.

In these cases, the latter two points are used to justify public ownership, which in turn defeats the third point.

> Were you born into a world with electricity naturally occurring in sockets?

Massive swaths of the US required government action to get telephone and electric service. In many cities/counties, the city or county owns the power utility. In other rural/suburban situations the power utility is a non-profit cooperative that was encouraged/bootstrapped through low interest loans in the 30s and 40s. Telephone universal service was achieved because AT&T agreed to it in exchange for the government allowing it to be a (natural) monopoly

That's now what natural monopolies mean, "natural" alludes to the fact that by nature, only one company will be able to operate and maintain and other companies will be locked out due to barriers of entry or other complications. Look into it

No, but I was born into a world that requires a massive amount of collaboration, specialization, and mutual respect for one another to enable our society.

Natural != occurring in nature in this context

This is a wonderfully uneducated response to the above point.

Go google "natural monopoly" please. No one is arguing that work is not happening to provide a service.

We're arguing that capitalism clearly fails to achieve good outcomes for optimizing the quality and cost of that service in the case of natural monopolies.

This is what’s called “bad faith”